does this mean I'm growing up?

A sure sign that I'm getting smarter as I get older:


This past week was an interesting one on the health front.


A. I was sick.


B. I only ran three times - and just nine miles total.


C. The last seven days have been food laden. A nachos and beer after-work get together. A mexican potluck at work today. A tray of baklava in the break room. Chipotle cheese mashed potatoes for dinner last night. The list goes on.


D. A scale that hasn't budged.


Used to be these things would throw me into a tizzy and I'd just say the heck with it and throw in the towel. I'm a pro at this type of rationalization - "Oh, well, I blew that week, so why even bother anymore?" But I'm not going that route this time. Yes, it's been an off week. Yes, it's hard to run when you can't breathe. Yes, I ate my first ice cream sandwich of the entire year today - and dang, was it good.


And yes, life goes on and I intend to live it. There's no point in being skinny and healthy if you don't live a little. There's always next week. (Or not, since my Mom and Stu get here Tuesday for a visit and I always seem to eat like a cow whenever they're here.) Okay then, I'll try something really radical. I'll go with moderation...and having a good time.


I couldn't do that in my twenties, or even my thirties. I was strictly an all or nothing kind of gal. But now it's finally sunk in that you really can inch your way to what you want...


...and actually have fun on the trip.

do I look indecisive to you?

One of these months I'm going to write my post before I go to Bunco, so that when I get home really late it's all ready to go. Better still, I'll schedule it on Blogger so it posts itself at an assigned time and I don't have to worry about it at all.


This won't be the month. Not even close.


So since it's midnight and I'm about to turn into a pumpkin - with nothing at all interesting to say - how about I ask for opinions? And just to shake things up a little bit, I promise not to use the words "tax", "pinhead" or "hot" even once. Okay? We'll go for a different kind of opinion today. Just to give you all a break. God knows you deserve it.


Here's the question - there's a local race here the middle of April, and in addition to a half marathon course, there's also a 5K and a 10K. (As a little aside, I am NOT the one who brought up the idea of running the 10K. Honest). But...I think it's kind of an interesting idea - in a boil yourself in oil sort of way. Anyway, I can't decide which one to do. The 5K would be fun and I could try to improve my time. It would be less stress and less training. But the 10K could be a pretty interesting challenge, although I'm not entirely sure why I feel the need to test myself again in that way so soon.


Any thoughts? 5 or 10...pick your poison.

race day

For something that kept waking me up last night in a sweaty panic, the 5k today went pretty well. I got up early, had some coffee and half a bagel and headed out. Surfer Dude and one of his friends went with me, and by the time we got to the starting place, the crowds were spilling into the street. We met up with all of my fellow ER workers and compared rotten nights of sleep. Evidently the stress bug was going around, and it was hitting us all pretty hard.


The weather was great. Warm and, since we were running on a river levee, windy. When the crowd of people in front of me started moving at the start, I popped in my earbuds and tried to calm down. SD and his friend were at my side, SD being completely bent on beating me to the finish. We wished each other luck. And then we were off.


The thing that amazed me the most was how easily I fell into my groove, and how quickly I did what I always do when I run. I zoned out, my mind a million miles away. I ran the first half with my gym buddy, but then when we made the half-way turn we split up. I kept passing and being passed by SD and his friend, but the last time I really saw them was when I was on the way back and they were still heading to the halfway point. Before I knew it, we were climbing the final hill to the finish. I saw the giant stopclock to my left and the crowd of people cheering as the runners crossed the finish line. It was an amazing feeling to cross that line, and to realize that I took five minutes off my gym running time. It was even more amazing to realize that I'd finished at all.


SD passed me right before the end, gloating and beaming simultaneously. (He's been telling everyone who will listen that he stomped his "old mother" today, but I have it on good authority from a friend that he got confused and turned around toward the finish at the one mile marker and not the half-way point. Whatever. It's obviously important to him that he "beat" me. I was just happy that he went and did it with me at all, although if I have to hear about "old mother" again, I may do a little stomping of my own).


And at the end? We all clustered together and congratulated each other and continued on with the teamwork and comraderie that gets us through the work day. Until one person said, You know...there's a 10K late next month. We should give that a shot. If we can do this, why can't we do that?


Uh oh. Just one more reason why I'm glad I'm not Type A.

what was I thinking? take 36

Oh, god.


This 5K race that I signed up for in some kind of fugue state is in four days. I think I'm gonna be sick. Seriously. What was I thinking?


On the plus side, it has brought out the inner jock of half the department. We all used to stand around and talk about what there was to eat back in the break room, but now we talk about training schedules and how far we ran the day before and how bad our feet hurt. Oh yeah, and who's going to crash and burn on race day and not even make it to the finish line. For a laid back bunch of people we've got some seriously Type A crap going on. Someone pulled up a half marathon course on the internet the other day and said Well, if you can do a 5K...


On the minus side, I'm trying to figure out which of my friends I trust enough to use the defibrillator on me when I collapse in a heap just the wrong side of the finish line. I'm up to running 5 miles, but something tells me that the conditions of an actual "event" will make the 3.2 mile course feel more like 20. Is it too late to sign up for the 2 mile Fun Walk? Is it too late to just skip the whole blasted thing and go straight for the green beer?


I don't feel so good.

mind over matter

This exercise thing is going way better than I would have hoped. I was thinking about it today as a way to keep myself motivated, and this is the scoreboard so far.


Twelve pounds down - and redistributed somehow.


I'm up to running three and a half miles at a time, and it's actually not been bad. I'm slow, but I get there. Three days a week I meet a friend at the gym and we keep each other honest. It's also good because we're switching up what we do, which keeps me from getting bored.


My ankle is doing great. Thank god. The first day I ran, I iced it and popped a handful of Ibuprofen but it never even twinged. I'm still hyper vigilant, but it hasn't been a bit of an issue.


The big one is that I just feel better. More energy, calmer, sleep like a rock. These are all very good things.


The first weekend in March I'm running a St. Patrick's Day 5K with a lot of co-workers as a charity fundraiser. It's the first organized run I've ever done, and I'm still not quite sure how I got roped into it. I'd never realized how Type A some of the people I work with are, and there's a lot of pride on the line here. There are a bunch of us who are just hoping and praying that we can drag our sorry bodies over the finish line in less than ten hours. On the other hand, any race that ends in a bar can't be all bad. Green beer and all.


Today I did a one hour power weightlifting class that makes me shake with fear at the thought of getting out of bed tomorrow morning. This will not be pretty. It's already ugly tonight. Where the hell did I put the Ibuprofen?


This is the physical - and final - component of the emotional cleanse I've been immersed in for the last year. All the bad crap has been raised to the surface, and now all I have to do is flush it completely out of my system. For good. Every drop of sweat is healing in an oddly profound way. I feel like a million bucks.


Until tomorrow morning.

a quarter of the way there

Well, I've made it through the first two weeks of this running program I'm trying. It's gone well up to this point, but we're at the stage where it's about to get a lot harder. I've actually enjoyed this so far, but up to now, it's been mostly walking and then bursts of running. But next week it becomes evenly split, and then the week after that it kicks into mostly running. I'm a little concerned that this is the point where I flat out stall.


Usually, when I start something health related, I begin with a diet. When I've lost "enough" weight, I add in exercise. This time I did it completely backward, by starting the running first. I told myself I could eat whatever I wanted as long as I exercised. And oddly enough, I wanted to eat better just because I was already being so virtuous about the running. The better I eat, the better I feel. The better I feel, the more I want to stick with the program. All of a sudden, I'm back in Motivated-ville.


Hmmm. Maybe I'm on to something.

the longest journey...

Well, this has got disaster written all over it.


Do you know the feeling when you realize you are completely driven to do something that's going to be a little bit of a, uh, stretch - and you have absolutely no idea where the whole notion came from? Maybe you get a wild urge to repair your own plumbing (and you've never done it before), or perhaps you audition for a local theater performance on a whim, decide to learn a foreign language, or even climb a mountain. All of a sudden this thing pops into your head and you just can't get it out. What then?


Some people - the smart ones - take a nap until the urge passes. Others jump in whole-heartedly and either a) fall off the mountain or b) land the lead role. Then there's the third group, the one that inches their way sideways to what they want to do, until voila! There they are. (They may not have a clue of what to do once they're there, but there they are anyway). If they're really lucky, at some point in this journey they figure out why the devil they want to do whatever it is in the first place. That's me. I'm the third group. And I have a wild notion.


I want to start running. Distances. And I would be very hard pressed to say why.


Actually, that isn't true - the first part, anyway. I have started running. Yesterday. It was an inauspicious beginning, to be sure, but you know what they say about the journey starting with a single step. I found this training program on-line that says it will have you running thirty minutes straight in eight weeks, and I'm giving it a try. It's a walk-run program, where you gradually decrease the amount of time you walk and increase the amount of time you run. I'm even playing by the rules, which I typically don't with anything exercise related. I always want to go from zero to a hundred in about five minutes, which ends up with me getting either burned out or hurt. I'm not in the market for either of those, so I'm being good.


This is what I did: Walk six minutes and run one minute. Four times. For a total of twenty four minutes walking and four whopping minutes running. (Otherwise known as twenty eight minutes at work).


How simple can it get?


It felt pretty good, and I made myself only run the one minute at a time, even though I wanted to do more. (Not a lot more, you understand. Just a little more). It was a gorgeous day to be outside, which made it even better. My brand new iPod (fully loaded for me by Sasquatch in a thinly veiled ploy to get me to lend him the money for a new video game that comes out Friday) performed beautifully, unlike my old one with the glitchy battery. It may have been a tiny step, but it was an enjoyable one, and I'm looking forward to the next time.


I'm sure the fact that I'm surrounded by runners has something to do with this. A lot of people at work run, and maybe I'm projecting, but they seem just a shade calmer than the rest of us. We pretty much run the gamut. One of the nurses just started a running program and is now running three miles straight. And she had never run before. A bunch of people run 3-5 miles a day regularly. Someone else just finished their first marathon. We all supported a co-worker who ran the New York Marathon last week. One of our docs even does the extreme running thing, where you run races up to 100 miles. Makes my feet hurt just thinking about it.


I've always been off and on athletic. I played tennis for hours every day growing up. When I was on the tennis team we'd practice for a couple of hours and run a couple of miles. Five days a week. In college, to appease an overly controlling boyfriend, I ran six miles a day for quite a while. I'm a world class walker - I love to walk. I like the gym, too, always have. I'm not getting any younger and I'm attempting to halt my butt's descent to my knees. And I keep hearing about what a peaceful, Zen-like experience it is. What other reasons do I need?



So why do I have the feeling of impending doom? I can do this, right?



Right?